In a recent literary meeting, writers loudly bemoaned the fact that their voices were not being heeded despite the freedom of expression that the country enjoys. They may well turn to the quality of their works to explain why this is so. Few writers in the past decade have taken to heart the challenge of finding the art to express the widening democratic aspirations of Nepal. Instead they have churned out easy cliches, tired doggerel, insipid slogans and trite nationalism. They have allied themselves cliquishly with the political parties, apologising for their mistakes and benefiting from their connections. Or they have remained completely aloof from the social sphere, as though our lives could take place in an absence of the collective.

With a very few exceptions, writers today simply do not match the fire of someone like Gopal Prasad Rimal or Bhupi Sherchan, who shattered empty icons and killed off old forms in order to demand of the times the liberation that Nepalis deserve. Ramesh Tufan's poems, translated below, give us a sense of what our writers today have been saying when they do speak of liberation. In the first poem, Tufan writes of personal desire and unfulfillment, which is the basis for a greater demand for rights:

THIRST

A person here comes to life bearing the wish for the thrill of victory and after birth forgetting oneself lives the errant life of a lone person waged in a game of dice

At this time don't ask why his own dogs have mauled their master's legs Only upon regretting does a person understand his own life force and after that begin to see in his defeated eyes dreams of the thrill of victory

and on the travels of life begin to seek a new path on the long travels towards fulfilment

In the two poems below, Tufan's demand for liberation becomes larger, and his critique becomes more social-though it remains rooted in personal experience.

CITY

Humanity is lost in a thicket of human beings Let us not try seeking it out for the ambushing beast sprung from the mind of man has long ago devoured it

One cannot say 'Death to this era'

Like the ornate letters spelling words of welcome before passengers at the airports and at the border gates the city stretches across the way an aged ravenous tiger

The city knows how to entice people and how to suck them dry leaving skeletal remains Like the aged tiger dissentors too here roar to satisfy their own greed Like dogs in the season of heat desires here rove desperately having been robbed by the newly arrived travellers of compassion

Neither can one embrace this era

The city is no civility Nor is it any culture If you can loot If you can't have others loot for you The city is a beast in ambush The city is an aged ravenous tiger The city is a dog in the season of heat

OBSTACLES MUST END

A stranger came to me and asked Don't you recognise me? Paralysed by uncertainty I stared for a long time but couldn't place him and said Forgive me Sir, I don't know who you are He said You don't recognise me? Me? I am the stifled sigh of your existence the truth you cannot live without your liberation Everything between us remained pending The wish to hear and learn more stayed unfulfilled as another person a stranger insinuated himself between us and sighing in monstrous satisfaction bound us with his wrathful eyes and said, There's a warrant in your names I have orders to bring you in These two parts of unrecognisability One of them reminds me of my life force the other erects himself as an obstacle to my liberation In this age when obstacles must end the obstacles to my liberation must also end now

These poems raise the question: What, in these regressive times, can writers do in order to continue establishing an argument for the expansion of democracy? What new expressions and what new forms can honor the complexity of our times' demand for liberation? Where is the literature that voices the freedom that is due the country?

Ramesh Tufan's poems are found in the collection Ramesh Tufan Naam Hunulai (To Have the Name of Ramesh Tufan), published by the Royal Nepal Academy in 1996.